Posts tagged ‘flight’

We had a fantastic 48 hours in Amsterdam – the first stop on our whirlwind European tour – despite doing very little actual sightseeing. The primary goal for our jaunt through the Low Countries was to catch up with friends and eat and drink well, and we accomplished both aims in spades during our brief stay.

The end of the year has a tendency to sneak up without much warning in Rwanda. Unlike its neighbors – and, for that matter, most other countries we’ve called home – which take a break from official business around mid-December, Rwanda keeps chugging along without too much holiday fanfare. Last week, for example, the ruling party held its thirtieth anniversary party congress, and this week the entire country is focused on its annual National Dialogue.

Munchkin had been talking about leaving school and going to nana’s house for weeks on end. Of course, he was much more excited about the three airplanes than S with her 8-month bump and old-lady compression socks, who was decidedly more apprehensive about the 25-hour trip. All in all, he was a very good traveler, sleeping overnight from take-off in Entebbe until touchdown in Amsterdam, and eventually napping on the flight to JFK as well.

Victoria Falls was an afterthought – a last-minute addition to our itinerary on the way back from Namibia to Rwanda. We had to fly through Zambia anyway, so we figured we should tack on a visit to one of the world’s most famous waterfalls since we were going to be in the neighborhood anyway.

Although there were a few moments when time seemed to slow to a crawl, the first six months of our Kigali tour flew by pretty quickly. We celebrated the midway point of our first year in Rwanda with a two-week trip to Namibia with S’s parents. We had spent a long time poring over the itinerary and were looking forward to sharing Munchkin’s affections – and care – with his grandparents almost as much as nana and zadie were looking forward to seeing their only grandson. But first, we had to reach Windhoek for our rendezvous – and inter-country travel in Africa is never a straightforward proposition.

We have been remiss in writing about Munchkin. Just in the two weeks we had spent in Paris without him, he grew and changed so much that there were new aspects of his personality for us to get used to. And that was three months ago.

Despite plenty of practiceover Munchkin’sfirst year of life, S dreaded our current trip stateside. With the possible exception of her first trip overseas with Munchkin when he was just 7 weeks old, she had not experienced this acute a level of pre-departure stress. Munchkin had just started taking his first independent steps when we last took him on an airplane, and we had a rough time on the flights. That trip was to Lisbon — a four-and-a-half-hour non-stop flight for vacation. This time, not only did we intend to take Munchkin on a much longer flight, but we also took advantage of the trip home to bring our dog back to the United States, which added several layers of travel anxiety to the mix.

Munchkin’s recent birthday has put us in a reflective mood. As his due date approached last year, one of our biggest fears about becoming new parents was that his arrival would change who we are, impacting not just how we live our day-to-day lives but also our ability to indulge in the activities we enjoy and the things we used to take for granted. Chief among these is our passion for travel, which we feared we might have to forego for the foreseeable future. We need not have worried.